As the philosopher Bernard Henri Levy has observed, the “spirit of Munich” is once again abroad in the world.

It is important to remember, though, that while the Munich spirit ended in appeasement — as it still may do in the Ukraine — it built on the Western democracies’ years of deceit, denial and self-deception concerning what was happening around them. Those three shameful qualities also characterize much of the international outrage and calumny now being showered on Israel over its heartbreakingly unavoidable incursion into Gaza.

As the civilian casualty toll in that unhappy strip of land climbs past 1,300, no decent person, which includes the overwhelming majority of Israelis, can regard the fighting in Gaza as anything but a tragedy. It is, however, a tragedy whose script was not written in Jerusalem, but in the furtive councils of Hamas, the terrorist clique that seized control of the area following the Israelis’ 2005 withdrawal. As a self-proclaimed Islamist organization, Hamas was an early adapter of jihadism. Its charter, which few of those protesting on its behalf ever will have bothered to read, still calls not only for the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Islamic state, but also for the killing of all Jews. Since it’s seizure of Gaza’s government from the PLO, Hamas has held power by intimidation, torture and the assassination of other Palestinians. Note the absence of any international protest over that.

If Hamas confined its oppressive depredations to its own people, others might have grounds to insist on Israeli forbearance, but that isn’t the case. Over the past two years it has fired literally thousands of rockets and mortar rounds into Israel. If the Jewish State’s defenses were not so proficient and Hamas’ artillery skills so poor, we’d now be counting Israeli casualties in the hundreds, if not thousands. If an irredentist Mexican group seized one of Tijuana’s barrios and began lobbing rockets into San Diego, what would the American public demand our government do?

Meanwhile, Hamas has constructed miles of sophisticated tunnels — electrified, reinforced with concrete and incorporating a rail system — under its border with Israel, hoping they can be used to infiltrate terrorists on kidnap and murder raids. Twice, in fact, over the past two weeks, Hamas fighters have emerged from undiscovered tunnels to attack Israeli farming settlements. This past week, the intelligence sources told the Israeli newspaper Maariv that Hamas planned to send hundreds of fighters dressed as Israeli soldiers through the tunnels to attack civilian targets during the September Jewish New Year holiday of Rosh Hashanah. In all the outrage over the tragic number of Gazan children killed in the current fighting, by the way, none of the anti-Israel polemicists has noted that, according to the Journal of Palestine Studies, hundreds of Palestinian children — 160 in 2012 alone — were killed when they were coerced into providing forced labor during the tunnels’ construction.

You can get the flavor of Hamas’ predatory misrule of Gaza by considering that one of its consistent complaints over the past few years is that the area suffers from a crippling shortage of construction materials because of the Israeli sanctions imposed in response to the terror attacks. However, as Gen. Sami Turjeman, chief of Israel’s Southern Command, pointed out, the materials incorporated into the tunnels discovered so far could have built “two hospitals, 20 schools, 20 clinics and 100 kindergartens.” So much for Hamas’ concern for the suffering people of Gaza.

To make matters worse, Hamas cynically uses Gaza’s civilian population as an intricate human shield for its military operations against Israel. It uses mosques to store rockets, explosives and other armaments; it puts rocket launchers next to hospitals and fires mortars from the doorways of schools being used to shelter the displaced. The complications of waging urban warfare under such conditions faced by the Israelis are horrendous. Consider that Gaza’s teeming 139 square miles are home to a million more people than populate the entire state of North Dakota. When recoiling from the appalling number of Palestinian children killed or injured, it’s worth recalling that Hamas has provoked this conflict in an urban environment in which 43 percent of the 1.8 million residents are under 14 years of age. For many Israelis, the sentiment that must come frequently to mind in these circumstances is one the late Golda Meir evoked, when she famously said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

The tiresome double standard applied to Israel by most of the international community is nothing new, but in much of Europe and in some quarters here in the United States, the current crisis seems to have provided a sinister permission for the expression of nakedly anti-Semitic sentiments. In Germany last week, for example, anti-Israeli protestors chanted, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” Jewish institutions in London and France were vandalized and painted with swastikas, while more than 100 Spanish filmmakers and artists published an open letter accusing Israel of “genocide.” It is sobering to realize that this sort of ancient anti-Semitism has lain dormant in the European cultural system, apparently waiting for this sort of trigger to spring into all the old murderous virulence.

The hypocrisy involved goes breathtakingly beyond a mere double standard. Consider that over the two weeks of Israel’s current campaign against the Hamas murder gang, nearly 2,000 Arabs were killed in Syria’s cruel civil war, probably as many in the fighting between secular warlords and Islamic militants in devastated Libya and nearly as many in Iraq. There, the gruesome jihadists who style themselves as holy warriors of a new Islamic “Caliphate” robbed and expelled the entire Chaldean Catholic population of Mosul, displacing overnight one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. For the first time in 1,800 years, the church and monastery bells of that ancient center of eastern Christianity are silent. Libraries containing some of the oldest and rarest Christian texts known to exist reportedly have been despoiled or simply destroyed.

Where are the protests and the United Nations resolutions? We apparently are left to conclude that when Israelis inflict casualties on Arabs as the unavoidable consequence of exercising their right to self-defense, it’s a “war crime,” even “genocide.” When Islamist Arabs inflict death, degradation and their obscurantist intolerance on other Arabs, it’s something to be ignored or passed over in silence.

There must be accountability for the ongoing tragedy in Gaza, but it needs to start with Hamas. Those who argue otherwise are either willfully wrong-headed or have something much darker than the humanitarian impulse in mind.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.

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